Naharnet

Bulgarian 'Gulag' Survivors Keep Painful Memories Alive

Gone now are the barracks, the sadistic guards and the barbed wire. Just one remaining watchtower and a plaque show that this marshy nature reserve on a river island in Bulgaria was once a place of misery.

But now, Belene's few remaining survivors want to create a museum to remind people of the suffering of the thousands of inmates inside communist-era Bulgaria's most notorious forced labour camp.

"The idea is to set up a museum like in Buchenwald or the other Nazi camps (in Germany)," said Vladimir Gerasimov, a member of a committee organising annual visits with former inmates as guides.

"The barracks must be reconstructed and we are currently gathering objects that belonged to the detainees, their letters or written memoirs," he told Agence France Presse.

Between 1944 and 1962 some 23,500 people including 2,100 women were incarcerated in Bulgaria's 45 labour camps, built to "re-educate" the "enemies of the people" as in Russia's Gulag system.

Like in the Soviet Union or other countries behind the Iron Curtain, an unknown number died in back-breaking manual work, malnourished and living like sardines in horrendous conditions.

Many were ordinary people, arrested by the secret police or denounced by their neighbours and friends for their "bourgeois" upbringings or speaking out of turn.

Belene, situated on an island on the River Danube, was Bulgaria's most infamous, its very name striking fear into people's hearts. Survivors say hundreds died here, if not thousands.

Around 3,000 men were crammed into the flimsy barracks, roasting and teaming with mosquitoes in the humid summer, draughty, leaky and freezing in the winter.

"Hunger, torture and labour -- that's what life here looked like," says Vande Vandev, 80, held prisoner in this "work education centre" as the communist regime called it.

As the son of the head of a banned party, Vandev was brought here in a cattle wagon in 1959 aged 24. He is one of a dwindling group of only 50 survivors, all now in their 80s or 90s.

"When we arrived on the island, they pushed us in the swamps and beat us," he recalls. "The guards called us 'skunks'."

"The guards had fun shooting at us at every occasion. The 're-education' consisted of regular beatings with batons or whips. The wounds festered. People hanged themselves with despair."

 

- Watery soup - 

The detainees, many from well-to-do families, received between 380 and 560 grams (13-20 ounces) of bread per day plus the thinnest of watery soups imaginable. 

They spent their days building dykes or labouring in the fields. Hundreds were crammed into each barrack, with insufficient space for everyone to sleep on the narrow shelves that served as a bed.

Today the site of the former camp is a verdant paradise, inhabited by more than 140 species of rare birds.

Nikola Daskalov, 80, who spent seven months at the camp, looked in disbelief at the way nature has reclaimed the place. 

"The island was pretty, I never noticed!" he winked.

"Instead, I remember well a slogan here: 'The enemy that does not surrender will be destroyed!' a thought by Felix Dzerhinsky," the founder of the Soviet secret police, the man said.

The last Bulgarian labour camps were officially shut in 1959 but only to give way to other more discreet but just as terrifying institutions called "labour groups" that lasted until 1962.

And in 1985, Belene was re-opened to imprison some 500 Bulgarians from the country's Turkish minority who resisted government attempts to force them to assimilate by changing their names.

Since the end of communism four years later, efforts to bring people to justice have made little headway. In the only case to make it to trial, several former guards escaped being sentenced.

Todor Atanasov, another former inmate in his 80s, remembered how many of the prisoners sung in a choir with the hope of getting a bigger chunk of bread.

"Surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, we listened to them singing a Soviet song that went like this: 'My country is so large (...) one can breathe freely'," he said, smiling grimly at the memory.

Source: Agence France Presse


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